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Search Engine SPAM With Facebook (Round 2)

In early November Google promoted their ability to execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments. A few years ago, Jed Singer and I did some digging to see just how well Facebook pages were crawled and indexed. The answer – not very well, but Facebook still enjoyed decent rankings for profile and brand pages alike, despite spidering issues. Our review suggested a heavy dose of domain authority and backlinking signals, and not necessarily on-page relevance.

Then, suddenly, Facebook pages started to show up less and less (somewhere around the time “Google Me” was the rumor) except for specific people and brand searches. I assumed a manual algorithm tweak to clean up the search engine result pages, and make general Facebook pages less of a player. The same kind you saw with Digg pages, Amazon subdomains, etc.

But when I read that Google is getting better at interpreting Facebook comments, I assumed they also got better at reading all Facebook’s public tabbed content. Still, I assumed they wouldn’t change their algorithm suppressing Facebook rankings.

Wrong…

This is one of several examples I found. It worried me about my long-tail for my websites, and sure enough, Facebook SERP SPAM there too. I don’t know if Google took their eye of their algorithm and made some changes without considering their prior intention, or if this is a real decision (can’t imagine why, though). I expect it won’t last long.

In the meantime, black hats will go at it, and white hats (and shoppers) will need to be annoyed by it. What a thoughtful holiday gift, Google!

Ex-big agency guy, now focused on helping small and medium sized business. I've been practicing SEO since 1998. I started the SEO practice at a major digital agency owned by eBay and helped develop SEO products for one of the largest ecommerce platforms. I'm a proud member of the Philadelphia SEO scene. I'm passionate about search, writing, UX, CRO, and psychology in marketing. Read More

Comments 8

Well, of course. Social spam has been a huge problem ever since Google started ranking based on it. It’s cheap and easy. The social networks even host your spam for you – no expensive link farm sites to operate. Everybody in SEO has known this for the last year.

We have a paper on this: “Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social” (http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf) showing the whole social spam ecosystem in detail. Social spam is now a big, well-developed industry with several tiers of services used together to spam Google.

Well, of course. Social spam has been a huge problem ever since Google started ranking based on it. It’s cheap and easy. The social networks even host your spam for you – no expensive link farm sites to operate. Everybody in SEO has known this for the last year.

We have a paper on this: “Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social” (http://www.sitetruth.com/doc/socialisbadforsearch09.pdf) showing the whole social spam ecosystem in detail. Social spam is now a big, well-developed industry with several tiers of services used together to spam Google.

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